Star Wars: Grave of Empire
by Evil Is A Relative Term
Summary: The desert was her first teacher. He will be her second. A story about legacies, lost souls, and long journeys through the stars.
1. SoE: Insidious

_"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you."_

L. R. Knost

Star Wars: Grave of Empires

Shards of Eskil:

Insidious

The man who'd made him with his mother did not look like a dangerous man.

He was soft-spoken, cultured, and much older than most human men when they became fathers. There was a way about him that always made him seem so reasonable that it deflected criticism and there was a quiet confidence in the way he conducted himself that inspired trust.

These things were all true.

They did not mean he was not a monster.

All Eskil need to do was to look at his mother, whom he loved but did not respect, for who admired broken things?

Whatever Thren Syzygy had been before she fell under Darth Sidious's sway—and the man did like to recount her glories, as if he'd come to own them when he'd brought her low—she existed now as the guttering embers of a dying star. If Eskil loved her, he also resented her for her weakness.

Resented her for being the restraint that kept him within the emperor's orbit.

Not always—it was a slow thing, this understanding. Even of what his mother was—and was not.

It would not begin until his world became wider than himself and his mother and the solitude of study on a planet of ruins underneath a red sky.

Until then, he had no point of reference for monsters, outside the apex predators that his mother pitted him against for his blooding.

A blooding set a child against sentient prey and gauged whether or not they were worthy of the teaching. This was a sacred rite of the sect of his mother, just as the exultation—the first slaughter of a sapient being—was.

The latter was the first time he saw his father in the flesh.

Before that it had always been holos and hollow promises and sometimes, a crawling sense of _something _in his head, which made his mother's lips go thin as she advised that it was foolish to fight against the Lord of the Sith.

This was strange advice from his mother, who had raised him in the fullness of ferocity and skill that were the marks of a darksider. Raised him to believe that one should never be quick to kneel or relent.

But not, apparently, to aspire to rise as a Sith.

When he had asked his mother why this was, she directed his gaze to the night that mantled the planet.

"Do you see all the space between the stars, Eskil? How small the lights seem, caught in the vast dark? There are many ways of being in the dark. Of thriving in it. The universe is always in motion—the strength of your path is in the strength of your will, the practiced excellence of your end-bringing, and your command of the Force. Not in how many beings you can make call you "Master". To take the throne of the Sith—to earn the right to call yourself a Sith Lord—is to make an enemy of all the galaxy, both light and dark. Patience is a weapon." Eskil caught a glimpse of her then, the powerful woman who might have once resented being made to kneel, but that glimmer snuffed out at her next words. "Submission is a protection."

Eskil kept her words in mind as his father's ship descended, but in the deep places of his mind, where he was restless and hungry for things he didn't understand, he was not ruled by his mother's admonition—and he knew he would not be able to keep his wild dichotomy of feelings hidden. If he desperately wanted his father's praise and acknowledgement, he equally resented being sequestered from the galaxy he was beginning to sense in the moments when his mind and his body stood still and he could feel the Force flow around him. Through him.

Usually, he did not hide things from his mother—he had little self that she had not shaped—but she encouraged him to seek out the dangers of the deep tombs and there were more things in them than deathstalkers nests and traps set for the unwary. There were shadows and whispers—memories ill-disposed to fade—that tried to creep into his consciousness. Made him see things, hear things—tried to hiss secrets in his ear and tell him stories dredged up out of the ruin of ancient glories.

He'd learned to hear these spirits without being ridden by them, though most were too faint to keep their grip for more than a few heart-stopping moments, and he called to the Force in the same way he'd learned to call it in dark rooms lit only by old malice.

_Hide me_, he thought, _protect my self from outside influence. _

He felt the Force as it shifted inside him—he had the sense that this stillness that he'd learned in fear and desperation wasn't like the other abilities he'd honed, which came from a place of power and not pleading. Eskil hoped his father did not notice—his mother hadn't, or hadn't said if she did, but then she'd never tried to seep into his mind from half a galaxy away either.

The first beings to come down the ramp were humanoids in red armor, with long capes and twinned weapons. They moved in eerie synchronization as they parted to allow the slow passage of a figure shrouded in a heavy cloak. The face beneath the hood almost did not look human, no matter what his mother claimed, but the eyes were Sith eyes and the presence in the Force was a familiar one.

This was the Emperor, then.

He was studied in his turn and Darth Sidious glanced over at his mother, who had bowed her head in deference from the moment the ramp had begun to lower. "It seems you have done a fine job in raising this one, Thren. I like the look in his eyes. I'm very pleased."

"Thank you, my lord," his mother murmured.

In hindsight, Eskil supposed he had been pleased. The Force did not always flow true in blood, the way many things did, and a long time after he would remember those words and come to suspect that perhaps there had been less able experiments that were culled without any compunction for the fact that they too had been his own children. But that was for later, when he began to wonder what a man like Darth Sidious wanted a child for.

Fear kept his thoughts shallow on that day, however.

Not of the Emperor. He was not wise enough for that yet and the idea of Empire was a distant one shaped only by his mother's stories—and she had not left this planet in his lifetime.

He was only afraid of disappointing his father.

Darth Sidious turned to his guards and murmured, "Bring out our guest," before he turned his attention back to Eskil. "Come closer, child," he invited.

Eskil did as he was bid, watching in his peripheral vision as the red guards dragged a struggling humanoid down the ramp.

"Yes. I think you have a very good chance of living up to the promise of your name," he said thoughtfully. "I have brought you a present for your exultation," he told him. "A most worthy foe. A Jedi, in fact."

A beckoned with his hand and the guards shoved their captive forward, his coerced footsteps sending red dust dancing in the air. His eyes darted between Eskil and the Emperor.

"This is a _child_," he protested. "What are you asking of me?"

"This child is a Sith and exceptionally strong in the Force. I think you will find him quite equal to you, if his mother is to be believed."

"Eskil will not fail," his mother promised solemnly.

"I should hope not," Darth Sidious replied blandly. "Thren, you will join me in my ship. Guards, remove the Jedi's restraints."

He produced a lightsaber from the depths of his robes and handed it to Eskil. "You will return this to him before you begin your hunt," he said. "There is little skill to be shown in slaughtering an unarmed foe. Though it is not wise to underestimate a Jedi, armed or otherwise."

"He's a child," the Jedi said again.

"After today," Eskil told him flatly, "I won't be."

He waited with restless anticipation for the Emperor and his mother to leave, before he returned the Jedi's weapon to him, crossing the red earth to do so.

The Jedi looked down at the lightsaber in his hand, his expression grim. "You don't have to do this," he said.

Eskil's brows furrowed. "No," he agreed. "There is always choice. But do you have the power to make it for me, Jedi?" he asked as he pulled up the full hood that offered protection from the glare of the relentless sun. "You do not. I am honored to match myself against your strength. _You _may feel however you like about it."

He unclipped his own saber from his belt. The call of the kyber within resonated up his arm, reminding him of the certainty of his own strength.

Jedi lived in cages of doubt. Sith were free of this fear of themselves—Eskil was allowed to revel in his own strength. A red blade singing under a red sun was a joy and there was lightness in his steps as he began to prowl in a wide circle around his prey.

He watched him like he watched the beasts he hunted, both with his eyes and with the Force that was within and between them.

There was no joy in the Jedi as he ignited his own blade. Resignation could be read in the grim set of his lips, determination in the tightness about his eyes, but it was clear that combat did not make his heart dance.

Eskil pitied him ever as he darted in to test his defenses, the red dust rising as a cloud around them as his deft footwork was matched by defensive saberwork that still had more flourishes than his own pared-down and aggressive style.

Sandeels were not particularly impressed by the ability to twirl one's saber artfully, after all, even if one did happen to meet them in the open instead of having all thirty-plus feet of them electrify the sand on which you stood.

Eskil was not yet full-grown—he had neither height nor reach on his opponent—but he was not reluctant to kill his foe.

The Jedi was and was weakened for it.

Eskil was not quite his match, saber to saber, not while the Jedi was fighting defensively. He largely ignored the conversation that the other male was trying to hold with him—he took a risk and tried to slide beneath the Jedi's guard, but his opponent merely propelled himself up and safely out of range of his lightsaber and took off sprinting toward a nearby ruin.

He could not help the delighted laugh that spilled up out of him.

It was not so ironic as a hunt through the valley might have been, but his already pounding pulse leaped at excitement of the chase. His pursuit was immediate and he drew on his connection to the Force to speed his steps, almost overtaking the Jedi before he even reached one of the crumbling walls.

As they passed the first wall, looming on their right, Eskil switched his saber to his left hand and slapped the palm of the other against the sunbaked durocrete, feeling in that instant all the microfractures that would eventually return them to sand. He made them explode instead, hurtling toward the Jedi, who was forced to whirl on his heel and defend himself from the largest pieces of debris.

After that display, the Jedi seemed even more reluctant to let him close the distance between them, attempting to use the ruins to his advantage.

He had at least stopped attempting to tell Eskil that he did not have to do this.

"Your mother said your name was Eskil. The Emperor said you would live up to the promise of your name. Do you even know what your name means?" the Jedi shouted at him in a last desperate attempt to distract him when he finally cornered his prey.

Eskil ignored him, breaking their bladelock and blasting him back with a raw wave of Force energy, the Jedi's body making a meaty thud as it rebounded against the durocrete.

"It means 'vessel'," the Jedi gasped as he lay sprawled before Eskil.

Eskil only blinked and drove his blade through his skull.

A/N: In order to clarify, because I saw some confusion from the first reviews, the Shards of Eskil chapters will be a series of prologues about Rey's parents, because I feel you have to meet people for more than four seconds in flashbacks to care about their fate and because this whole thing was very murky in canon. As far as I am aware, neither of them have canon names, but as you might be able to guess from Eskil being Sheev Palpatine's son, he is also Rey's father.

On another note, the sandeels were inspired by a piece of concept art by John Seamas Gallagher.

/artists/john-seamas-gallagher/attachment/john_seamas_gallagher_06a/


	2. SoE: Starfall

A/N: Just one more of these prequels to go—they're a trilogy, because of course they are.

Chapter Two

Shards of Eskil

[_Starfall_]

Having been kept isolated for so long left Eskil raw to the roiling, seething masses of sapient life beyond Moraband. Their intentions pressed against him as he walked through them, apart from them, his youth hidden behind red armor and the presupposed oath of silence that accompanied that armor keeping him from being questioned as he moved through the halls of palaces and planets and starships in the Emperor's wake.

If he had felt himself trapped before, it was nothing to how he felt now in the sterile corridors and empty opulence of his father's throne room, watching the military pantomime that played out around him.

He was a beast in a cage.

There were others, he discovered, Force-sensitives under the employ of the Emperor. His Inquisitors and his Hands. With them he hunted such Force-sensitives as did not serve his purposes and Jedi without exception. Eskil wondered about why he was not put to such use—he could feel the sharp edges that had been so carefully honed being ground to dullness with the monotony of his days, but the Emperor gave such reasonable explanations he had no real ground to refute them.

He was naïve, inexperienced in the ways of the wider galaxy, and should take some time to accustom himself to living amongst Coreworlders before his father would feel comfortable sending him out on such missions. After all, in large part the Empire's methods remained so military because many parts of the galaxy clung tight to a legacy of crime—and whose syndicates had become so entrenched under the Republic as to be almost empires of their own. They represented a very different kind of danger than the kind his childhood had prepared him to face.

Eskil had never met a problem that couldn't be solved through sufficient destruction, but these worlds were not his. If he was naïve, there was nothing wrong with his capacity to learn through silent observation and he had the patience of a desert predator. He would wait.

For now.

So Eskil had to content himself with the unsatisfactory repetition of forms in empty rooms and the unstimulating combat offered by training droids.

This was not how he had understood being Sith.

_Is this freedom? _he thought as he watched in silence as Darth Vader went to one knee before his master.

There were other Force-sensitives in the Emperor's employ.

There were none like Vader.

Despite being as much machine as man, Eskil had never sensed his like in the Force. He'd understood in an instant that he was more dangerous than any creature he'd ever cut down on Moraband and yet Darth Vader deferred easily to his Emperor and lived a life of almost startling austerity, absent the fierce joy of life that characterized his mother in her most wondrous moments. Even the pride of strength was muted in him—he treated it almost like there was no glory or gladness to his power.

Eskil couldn't understand where his passion lay, the well of his strength as a Sith, and sometimes when he looked on the mask that hid the man beneath, he could almost hear his father whisper _wrecked, ruined_ like a man grieving.

He let him whisper. Darth Sidious ruled others through words, but Eskil had found his promises empty since he was a child.

As time crept by, his suspicions solidified to an understanding of why Darth Sidious kept him close.

Despite every sign of loyalty, his father did not trust his apprentice, which might have been the most Sith thing about him. Eskil found the Rule of Two and the lack of true bonds practiced by the Emperor's sect to be as strange and restrictive in their way as the tired dogma of the Jedi Order.

The Sith religion as Sheev Palpatine practiced it sacrificed everything for power.

The Sith religion as Thren Syzygy taught it gave one the power to have everything.

Eskil had never imagined that there existed a Sith as passionless as the Emperor, but it was impossible to deny that there was something mesmerizing about the way he treated the galaxy as his own dejarik board—the way he raised his voice instead of a saber and still struck down uncountable beings. He was obsessive, yes, but it was the cold and endless hunger of collapsed stars, not the blazing thing that still smoldered inside Darth Vader's mechanical shell.

Not the wakening force inside Eskil, which had been only energy and potential until he realized what the promised freedom of the Sith might mean against the vastness of the galaxy.

For him freedom wasn't bowing and scraping before his father—it wasn't in service and it certainly had little to do with bringing order to the multitudes he neither knew nor cared to know about.

Eskil was allowed to return to Moraband on occasion and he unobtrusively watched the pilots of the starships in the slight hope that piloting was something that could be learned through observation, but neither the pilots nor the ships themselves ever ferried him there twice.

It didn't matter. He had never lost that sensitivity to other minds and these beings were accustomed to following orders. He could force his will on them.

First, though, he had to convince his mother.

"The Old Republic couldn't do it at the height of their glory and the New Republic didn't dream of it in the depths of their folly. This Empire will never, not even if it exists for a thousand years, be able to bring every planet in this galaxy beneath its boot. We can go. We can leave. We can be _free_," he insisted. It was the closest someone raised as he had could come to begging, though he'd seen examples enough in his time with the Emperor.

"Moraband made us strong," he whispered. "_You _made me strong. But that strength is mine and I won't waste it waiting on his favor. My desire, my will, is my own. And I am more than an extension of him. So are you. You are more than _this_," he said, hand sweeping out to encompass the ruins of a dead empire.

His mother's grave expression didn't shift. "Perhaps that is true of all the smugglers and spicerunners and general scum of the galaxy, but you're more a fool than I raised you to be if you don't think he doesn't have tracking fobs prepared."

"Let them follow." Eskil smiled for the first time in many days at that idea.

There was a brief spark in Thren's eyes, but she sobered so quickly it was almost as if had never happened. "It's not about the distance in parsecs, it's about the distance in here," she said cuttingly, pressing her index and middle finger to his forehead. "There's no escaping him there."

"They're just words, mother. Just whispers. Nothing worse than what you hear in the tombs."

There was a hardness to the line of her jaw as she bit back her words and shook her head. "Enough," she said sharply. "Enough," repeated more softly.

That was her refrain even as the years wore on and wore on them both, Eskil becoming more jaded and bitter even as his father began allowing him certain freedoms and alluding, upon occasion when Eskil allowed his discontent to become obvious, to the terrible things that could befall a Force-user outside his graces.

All cloaked in his talk of a better galaxy under a firm guiding hand, of course, and the threat never to Eskil.

Darth Sidious had engineered him a very obvious weakness—Eskil did not know if he intended for him to overcome it, the way it was whispered that he had overcome the master to whom he owed his own power, or if it was simply a matter of convenience, a failsafe like the behavior modification chips of the Clone Wars.

Enough was enough.

Not for him. He could have gone on bearing it, hoping silently for the success of the rebellion or the ambition of his apprentice or some shatterpoint in whatever hold his father had over his mother.

Thren Syzygy walked her own path, shadowed and small as it had become at the end, and perhaps he would never understand what bound her to his father or her choices, but they had been hers.

Her sect had rites for all the hours of mortality, for the rise and the fall both. Darklighters did not fear death, not as Darth Sidious did, but they disdained to die in peace—they called it the ascension, the last magnificent clash of one's strength against a beast in an echo of the blooding of their childhood, if there was no sapient opponent worthy of their death.

Eskil felt the moment of her resolve and glimpsed her silhouetted against the red sun before she began to slide down into the telltale depression of a grandmaw's nest.

He heard the hunting shriek half a galaxy away before he was anchored again in his own body, rage spilling up and seeking expression in action. In that moment, he felt as if he could reach out and touch the cold metal that caged him and tear apart this entire station.

Through the haze of his pain, he murmured the words that had been repeated to him endlessly in his childhood. "The Force is with us," he acknowledged.

It was certainly no matter to gain access to an officer of sufficient rank and convince him that there was an urgent matter that required his presence on one of the Core Worlds. Eskil masqueraded as one of the innumerable attachés that served the officers, almost as faceless to those of rank as stormtroopers and far less conspicuous alone.

On Kuat he stowed himself away on one of the massive freighters that regularly traveled along the starlanes to repair and resupply Imperial interests in the Mid Rim.

It was only after crushing the will of several captains of increasing dubious transports and stepping foot onto the soil of a planet in the Outer Rim Territories that he felt himself beyond his father's reach.

He didn't—couldn't—trust it, though.

_Freedom is a lie. _


End file.
